Honda and Redwire are building a robot to do astronauts' scut work, scanning barcodes and swapping sample trays, on future commercial space stations that may fly with crews as small as two. The combo pairs Redwire's reaching platform with Honda's touch-sensitive robotic hand, but no space station has actually signed on to use it yet.
— via Universe Today, Andy Tomaswick
A dying white dwarf 270 light-years away shows niobium levels 1,000 times the Sun's, evidence astronomers say points to a Jupiter-like planet that formed from the star's own death debris. It orbits every 4.4 days and marks the first detected second-generation planet, reopening a decades-old argument over whether stellar remnants can build new worlds.
— via Universe Today, Bruce Dorminey
A galaxy 55 million light-years away is spinning with its core rotating perpendicular to the rest of its disk, and Hubble thinks it knows why. New Webb images push deeper, revealing a star five to eight times the Sun's mass carving a 3.5-light-year gold cavity in a stellar nursery 3,300 light-years off.
— via NASASpaceFlight.com, Haygen Warren
Blue Origin's launch mount collapsed into the flame trench in May, yet crews have already restacked tower modules and rebuilt the launch bridge from salvaged parts. With roughly 12 weeks left before Jeff Bezos's December target, key hardware for the pad's new vertical-integration design still hasn't shown up.
— via NASASpaceFlight.com, Ryan Caton
NASA's Artemis II field guide lays out what four astronauts actually saw and said on their lunar flyby: a 54-minute solar eclipse, Earth lit by moonlight instead of sunlight, and meteorite strikes too faint to spot from home. The crew's own photos, sketches and radio chatter now form the record.
— via Universe Today, Matthew Williams
Nearly 100 holes melted into Antarctic ice form the largest neutrino detector ever built. A founding leader of the project that turned this frozen observatory into reality has just been named a Nobel laureate in physics.
— via NASA Breaking News
NASA packed 12 experimental capsules into a cargo ship full of station trash, using its fiery reentry to test next-generation heat shield materials. The data could shape protection for future Moon, Mars and even Titan missions, at a fraction of the usual cost.
— via NASA Breaking News, Tara Friesen
NASA wants private companies to replace the International Space Station, and it just released the final rules for bidding. Proposals are due Dec. 8, with contract awards expected in spring 2027.
— via NASA Breaking News, Jessica Taveau
A balloon-borne telescope floating at 35 km found the Sun's "quiet" surface isn't quiet at all. Its calm canopy hides narrow, flickering magnetic threads that flip polarity and turn out to be twisted flux ropes, the same structures behind solar flares.
— via Universe Today, Andy Tomaswick
SpaceX tries again early Saturday after an auto-abort stopped a Falcon 9 with 58 seconds left on the clock, and a trip to horizontal at the pad hinted at hardware trouble. The rocket carries 21 Northrop Grumman satellites for the military's missile-tracking constellation, pushing the network past 60 in orbit.
— via SpaceFlightNow, Spaceflight Now
NASA's administrator is trading a rocket for a fighter jet cockpit, flying an F-5 over MetLife Stadium to open Sunday's Jets-Browns game. The flyover kicks off NASA's Inspiration Tour, which wraps in November with a Kennedy Space Center expo for America's 250th anniversary.
— via NASA Breaking News, Jessica Taveau
SpaceX pulled all six engines off Ship 42 and sent it back for a third round of cryo-proof testing, likely to fix whatever caused Raptor Vacuum engine outs on Flights 12 and 14. Target launch for Flight 15 is now NET Nov. 8, with Flight 16 aiming to be the first Starship launch from KSC's pad 39A.
— via NASASpaceFlight.com, Ryan Weber
Four astronauts landed off California this morning after 237 days in orbit, and one of them just became the first person to fly on a Crew Dragon twice. The station's traffic jam continues: a trash-filled Cygnus departs tomorrow, a cargo Dragon launches next week with the final two solar arrays needed to boost the ISS's power supply.
— via SpacePolicyOnline, Marcia Smith
James Webb just traced a millisecond radio burst to a tiny galaxy seen when the universe was about 3 billion years old, making it the most distant fast radio burst found yet. Its young, newly formed stars point to a magnetar flare rather than a slow neutron-star merger as the likely cause.
— via Universe Today, Brian Koberlein
Four astronauts splashed down off Los Angeles Thursday after 237 days in orbit and more than 100 million miles traveled. Their work included growing stem cells for therapies and generating IV fluid on demand, research NASA says is paving the way for Moon and Mars missions.
— via NASA Breaking News, Lauren E. Low
NASA just moved closer to flying a telescope built entirely of glass, designed to catch gravitational wave ripples smaller than a helium atom across a 1.6 million-mile satellite array. The new Engineering Test Unit is the last pre-flight version before hardware heads to ESA for a mid-2030s launch.
— via NASA Breaking News
NASA and the Energy Department just signed a deal to build a launch-ready lunar fission reactor by 2030, with a test reactor, Space Reactor-1 Freedom, flying in 2028. The agreement covers everything from fuel production to launch, aiming to power a permanent Moon base and eventually Mars missions.
— via NASA Breaking News, Gerelle Q. Dodson
One rare night of calm UK sky and a trick called lucky imaging, stacking thousands of fast exposures, turned into an unusually crisp shot of Saturn, its moons Titan and Enceladus, and the rings' faint spokes. The timing helps too: Saturn hit opposition on October 4th, putting it closer and fully lit.
— via NASA Breaking News
A one-tonne hopper powered by a throttleable methane engine will test lunar landing tech in the UAE desert next year, not the Moon. It's the first rung on a ladder toward The Exploration Company's full-scale Nyx lander, with breadboards already built to cut risk ahead of the flight.
— via European Spaceflight, Andrew Parsonson
Solar Orbiter sampled charged particles inside a giant magnetic kink in the solar wind and found a mix that could only form in hot loops on the Sun's surface. The finding settles a long-running debate by showing two rival formation theories are both right, just at different stages of a switchback's journey.
— via ESA News
